'Sophie's Choice' centers around the summer of 1947, where young, aspiring writer Stingo, leaves his family home in North Carolina and moves to a cheap boarding house in Brooklyn, New York. There, he meets the ingenious Nathan Landau and his beautiful Polish lover Sophie Zawistowska, who are involved in a difficult, yet passionate relationship. The story looks into the dark pasts of the three characters; Stingo's familial ties to slavery, Nathan's struggle with mental illness and Sophie's devastating experience in the concentration camps and her story of being a Holocaust survivor.
My Thoughts:
I tried to not give too much away in the introduction to my discussion about this novel, as it is filled with surprises and many plot twists that should be discovered on the page than on my blog!
This really is an excellent novel, and is filled with both emotional, and historic renditions of what it means to be a survivor of the Holocaust, along with critical analysis of ideology, faith, memory and most importantly guilt. This is a novel consumed with guilt and lies, even the narration itself is dubious, which gives the reader the task of deciding for themselves what is truth and what is not - you are not simply complicit in the character's stories.
The Holocaust is a huge and exceedingly controversial topic to undergo, which Styron is only too aware considering the themes and technical discourses used throughout the novel. Holocaust literature is no rare thing in 2013 - stories of survivors grace the best-sellers stacks in every book shop, however, this novel was written in 1979 - in a time when the Holocaust was very much a taboo subject, and people were still coming to grips with the atrocities committed in Europe throughout WWII. It is this awareness of the topics importance that drives the story - the important notion of the 'choices' made throughout this time, and the choices made after it - defining not only those who lived through the horror of the Holocaust - but those who will live after it - the 'survivors', the rest of the world. The thing that gets you through the novel is Sophie's story - her background and history of living in Poland to her terrible ordeal in the concentration camps - leading up to the climactic moment of her 'choice' on entering Auschwitz.
The characters themselves, although perhaps a little stereotypical (however this does help with the characterization), are fully formed, each with their own riveting and tragic back story. There are moments of profound sadness, as well as revelation and the occasional comic line, however, the story is very much introverted into the mind of Stingo; who, like the reader is struggling to understand the relationship between the lovers and how they managed to become so broken. It is, in this sense a narrative of discovery, as every few chapters, a new revelation about Nathan and Sophie is unveiled adding a new twist to their tragic tale.
However, there are problems with this text. It has a huge scope, and covers many social, racial and historical themes and contexts, which, I believe, is the crux of the story - there is just too much to unpick. It feels like Styron wanted to write three different novels, but ended up blending them all together to create one huge moral circus, not knowing which ideological viewpoint it comes from. My main quarrel with the book is how the story does not stand up to the title - 'Sophie's Choice'. The story is told completely from Stingo's point of view, in retrospect - giving the reader due justification to find the narrative scrupulous. He tells us throughout that he was 'privileged' to have been the only one to talk to Sophie about her time in Auschwitz and that it was a topic never broached or understood by her lover Nathan, convincing us of his truthfulness, however, this is where the story falls short. Despite her name being in the title, her story is dominated by men - she is abused and controlled by Nathan, she was victimized by the patriarchal system of Nazism, by her father and most evidently, by Stingo - taking her story and using it to form his own. It is this duplicitous nature of the novel that threw me - I thought it was going to be a story of what it meant to be a woman in the Holocaust - however, we never know what Sophie is thinking, we can never trust her speech as it is all told by a man, a young, naive, American man, who did not experience the Holocaust, nor understands it.
I have other scruples with the novel too; for example the comparison made by the writer between Slavery and the treatment of African-Americans in the South to the near abolition of the Jews in the Holocaust. Like I said before, it is as if he could not decide whether he wanted to write about one, or the other, so he writes about both - and decidedly too - Styron seems to be screaming out the question to his readers - can you compare these? Ultimately, I have to say 'no' - I do not believe that you can compare Slavery in the US to the concentration camps of Europe - they are two different atrocities that, yes, do correlate on a human and emotional level, however, I think too much time is dedicated to this in the form of melancholic postulation, not only by Stingo, but all the characters.
Conclusion:
I would rate this novel as a 6/10 - if you have the time to read it (as it is a hefty 632 pages!) then it is worth doing. It offers a unique perspective on the Holocaust and raises all sorts of philosophical, social and moral questions relating to, not only what it means to live in a world Post-Holocaust, but to questions of power in society, race, gender and historic relations.
If you would like to ask me any questions about 'Sophie's Choice', or would like to discuss the novel in any way, feel free to send me an email!
Happy reading!
Em x
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